by Ryan S. Johnson
Ways in which Overlords resembles Titan: Your Overlord (aka, Titan) begin play with a small host of creatures. You must travel from hex territory to hex territory in the quest to recruit more creatures to make your army stronger. You may split your force and keep it together, to a point. There are advantages and disadvantages to either. When you get a chance to recruit new creatures what you are able to recruit will be based on what you have in that army presently. The end goal, of course, it to go over and beat the snot out of the enemy Overlord. Also, as you travel around the board and win battles your Overlord will collect what amounts to EXP and will grow more powerful, like in Titan. Also like Titan, each terrain type provides a separate "Battle Board" and when your army enters a hex and has to do battle you fight that battle on the separate "Battlescape" (aka, battle board). Ways in which Overlords differs from Titan: 1) In Titan you had specific creature types and based on those specific creature types and the number of them you had in your army you would be able to recruit more powerful creatures that were related to that same "family" of creature. In Overlords all creatures and classified by power type. This is noted by an alphabetical assignment. There are A, B, C, and D class creatures. Creatures have three primary stats. These are Hit Points, Movement and Class types. The class type is the letter assignment. A class creatures will roll a D4 in battle, B's roll a D6, C's a D8, and D's a D10. The amount rolled translates into the power of their attack and the amount of damage they can deal to an opposing monster when fighting on the tactical battlescapes. Some creatures will also have special abilities such as "range striking" which basically means they can shoot at a distance. Another special ability is an open ended attack. That means if the monster rolls the maximum number on its die for its attack it may add another die result to the attack and keep doing so as long as it keeps turning up the maximum die result. There are other special abilities as well. Creatures with a special abilities are considered a double letter. Hence, an "AA" or a "BB". When it comes time to recruit a monster (which is done after winning a battle) it takes 3 of a monster type to be able to recruit the next higher type. Hence if your army has 3 monsters of type "A" in it after winning a battle, then you would be able to recruit a monster from the "B" pool of monster tokens. If you had an "A" and another monster that was an "AA", then you could recruit a "B" with just those two units. If you do not have tripples of a unit type then you would still be able to recruit a monster equal to the higher monster type already in your army (not counting the Overlord himself). 2) In Titan the board often dictated the direction you had to move. Arrows pointed your army in certain directions. In Overlords players have complete freedom of movement. This is unike Titan because the individual terrain types do not influence the power/type of monster you can recruit. Instead the individual terrain types will dictate 1) the battlescape you will fight on and 2) if you enter a hex that does not contain an army from an opposing player then there is a chance you will encounter an host of NPC monsters which one of your opponents may play for that battle. How many monsters you have in your army and the total strength of that army will influence the likelihood of encountering NPC monsters and the quantity of them. 3) You can lose the game in two ways. If your Overlord is killed, you lose. However, you must also always maintain control of at least one fortress. You begin play in one of the fortresses. You can capture others as game play goes. The rules do not require you maintain control of your original fortress, just so long as you control at least one. 4) There are special "tower" hexes where you may encounter specific NPC monsters. These are not random encounters. They are usually very powerful NPC critters with unique abilities that will be tough to defeat, but in defeating them you will often get extra and more powerful monsters to recruit and a strong EXP reward for your Overlord. 5) Chaos Gates. There are a number of hexes on the game board that are Chaos Gates. Since the game gives players complete freedom of movement, drawing a "battle line" on a perimeter to defend your fortress might seem easy, and somewhat more “warga-mish" than would be preferred. The Chaos Gates help to greatly lessen that factor. An army entering a Chaos Gate hex will roll to see which other Chaos Gate on the board they will be teleported to. If you are playing with multiple boards, there is a rule that can allow a Chaos Gate to let you jump from one board to another. 6) The monster pool is limited. When a monster is killed it is removed from the game. So how you chose to recruit monsters will have an impact on your strategy and the access other players may have to certain monsters. Once all of the "A" class monsters have been recruited, then no player can recruit an A, only B's or higher. What monsters are available in the mid game will likely influence how you group your armies together, which of course, will impact your movements and strategies. Sales of Overlords have been very strong so far for the two weeks it has been available. I have no doubt that some people will reviewing it shortly. As a company we prefer to play little to no part in initiating reviews and rather let the market do that on its own. Giving product away to initiate reviews often appears self serving and portrays a potential bias by the person getting the freebie. We prefer to see independent third party reviews, even if there tends to be a few less of them (due to us not forcing reviews onto the market). Not something every board game company might agree with, but one that has worked well for us in the past. If you have any questions I will be happy to tackle them or pass them onto the game's designer if I feel I can not address them properly. Back to Strategist Number 367 Table of Contents Back to Strategist List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by SGS This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. |